Findings in yeast and human suggest that evolutionary divergence in cis-regulatory sequences impact translation initiation sites (TISs). Here we employed the TIS homology concept to study a possible link between all categories of tandem repeats (TRs) and TIS selection. Human and 83 other species were selected, and data was extracted on the entire protein-coding genes (n = 1,611,368) and transcripts (n = 2,730,515) annotated for those species from Ensembl 102. On average, every transcript was flanked by 1.19 TRs of various categories in their 120 bp upstream RNA sequence. We detected statistically significant excess of non-homologous TISs co-occurring with human-specific TRs, and vice versa. We conclude that TRs are abundant cis elements in the upstream sequences of TISs across species, and there is a link between all categories of TRs and TIS selection. TR-induced symmetric and stem-loop structures may function as genetic marks for TIS selection.